Chapter 5 – The Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming (A deep anthroposophical study of the transformation of thinking, sense-perception, and building the bridge of spirit-remembrance through the Moral-Cognitive Aspects of the work with the Etheric Christ)
If a researcher is going to recreate the naturally given meeting with the soul of Christ in the invisible world of life and light, using an Imaginative and moral anthroposophical elevation of consciousness, there are two obstacles that must be overcome – ordinary thinking and ordinary perception. Furthermore, such supersensible research has to be remembered in normal consciousness, and therefore a new sort of spiritual memory must be developed. The three parts of the chapter elaborate in great detail how this can be done. Once again, Dr. Ben-Aharon has carefully consulted and re-experienced what Rudolf Steiner had to say about the main issues in hundreds of texts. One can follow this trail in the robust end notes. The basic process that happens when a human being sees and thinks about objects in the world has been one of the main concerns in Ben-Aharon’s books, such as the lectures in Spiritual Science in the 21st Century, Cognitive Yoga, the Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art and to a certain extent, Jerusalem. He focuses on how modern subjective consciousness and possession of clear ideas is created by a mostly unconscious process of appropriating the living spiritual world (which is a wholeness into which the human being is fully woven) and reversing it. Human consciousness splits the singular spiritual ocean of wholeness into many selves, objects, and problems of knowledge. The real world of spirit, soul, and life is paralyzed, killed, frozen, and solidified into mental pictures, words, and abstract ideas. The good part is that this has allowed the modern ego to become independent, strong and free. Clear perception and logical thinking has also allowed the development of precise and orderly hard sciences, based on strict mathematical organization with a moderate degree of community verification and unbiased experimentation. In modern abstract thinking, calculation, and scientific research, thinking has finally completely broken itself off of the starry, ensouled, and living world in which it was born. This is a positive development for the earth and humanity, because it creates free individuals. The bad part is that the cognitive and moral reversal of the world is not recognized. The ego spreads its veil over the spiritual world, but the subjective human forgets it. What we are left with is a dead world, like the reflection in the mirror. Spiritual scientific elevation of consciousness must find a way to cross this canyon back to the real world.
Opening the Gate of Thinking (How to Spiritualize Thinking)
In order to do this, we have to become aware of how in each reflective thought, pictorial fantasizing, intellectual speculation, memory, and calculation, an element of our own life stream is suppressed, paralyzed, emptied out, reversed, digested, and forgotten. We have to find the original life that we strangle in every thought. This struggle to uncover it awakens an existential angst, but the inner burning fire of anguish and modern confusion at the heart of this modern problem of consciousness can be effectively used, if it is changed into a calm tool of research. We have to be able to stand the pain, suffering, and feeling of dying. When we use Rudolf Steiner’s living epistemological texts, like the Philosophy of Freedom, to uncover the pure will which is creating concepts at the center of thinking, we eventually find that Christ himself is covered over precisely at this boundary between living real thinking, and its fragmented, dead reflection. The shocking paradox is that Christ is crucified, He sacrifices Himself, in order for us to develop self-conscious thinking. Our solidity of belief and consciousness that we are living as free personalities in a world of material objects suffocates the etheric Christ. He dies where thinking dies. Where real thinking dies and becomes mere representations, He also disappears. Because He is the source of the I AM who creates and wills all spiritual, living thinking. We have to struggle to wake up to this consciously. This means to reawaken to the utmost spiritual nature of our own higher self. To stand firmly in our mental ground, we kill the Christ, but by uncovering the moment of creating the past moment, we create the possibility of consciously working with Him, learning from Him, and weaving together with Him. (pp 65-69) This is what Ben-Aharon calls the Event of Thinking in other books such as The Colmar Lecture in Spiritual Science in the 21st Century. To find this time and place where thinking dies, and thus to awaken spiritually to the new appearance of the Christ spirit in the etheric world, we must first break through the solid ice of our reflections, and cancel our mental picturing. This reflective association of subjective ideas puts a veil over reality and the vision of the future which is always part of us. We must find and experience how the will actually regulates life and death in our conscious thinking. How is this mental image, feeling of inner self, and memory of the past formed? “There is a freezing and preservation of the difference of time that has elapsed, a stretching and spacing of time – a killing of time and a temporal immortalization and preservation of the killed time – in every act of ideation and perception...Every moment of our life-time that is raised into self-consciousness is in this way always split in two, [1] into a living and creative unknown element...pushed back and preserved as future potentiality, and [2] into something that is fixed, made non-living and hence, remains as an available element for later recollection.” (p 70). The potential self coming to us from the future that we always forget (in the act of remembering!), is like a dark brother that is discovered in the pure will that creates thinking’s elements. We therefore have to build a solid ‘stone’ of conscious awareness in this precise area in the act of knowledge, experiencing our modern death, crucifixion, and resurrection in each moment of conscious thinking. We then can make the veil of death in our conscious thinking transparent once again, by pouring our life back into it. “We begin to transform the being of Death into our cross of supersensible perception, which is the gate of vision that thinking has opened with our soul...We see ourselves hovering over the abyss that opens under our mind’s feet in-between the dark and sinking, life-carrying will seed and the birth of the abstract, clear daylight of thinking...dividing ourselves consciously into two selves, viewing both from the two directions.” (pp 71-72)
We can recognize how the World Self puts its seal on the creative life of the Logos, dismembering but preserving its offspring in the destructive flow of time. The place and time where thinking dies is described by Steiner in the essential passage from Occult Physiology, where he describes how the two etheric streams come together inside the head (one from above and one from below), near the pineal and pituitary glands. The union of the two streams in between these poles can be canceled, and when the two streams are consciously held apart, a new flow of empty time or pure duration arises. This can allow the astral body to free itself from the dying-engraving process of memory-formation. We can then perceive the Christ-consciousness arising from the empty tomb of the head, looking from outside. “In...daily consciousness, we have thinking always ‘in front’ of our eyes, guided by the unseen will at our back. This thinking leads us outward into the external world. But now we have turned around at life’s threshold; we look inward into the dark of spirit night, as we formerly looked out into the external light of day. At noon time, we had thinking’s impetus, the will, behind us: now we have thinking’s memory behind us, guiding us, as Ariadne’s thread, into the inner labyrinth of living will.” (p 77)
We learn how to cross pure thinking and the will to awaken the new supersensible vision of the invisible life that surrounds us. The Imagination of the reversed thinking awakens as a triumphant being, like Michael holding his conscious-sword. But a deeper and gradual soul and moral transformation must also develop. To practice this, one must focus the will on a single concept, while setting aside the pictorial elements and dynamic elements of thinking and willing in the head. With intense awareness, we let the concept disappear and a negative thought space opens. A sucking vacuum of empty space turns us inside out. The universal wills in us. The infinite circumference and periphery takes me over as I surrender to its openness. Through this experience of the externalized WILL, we begin to feel an invitation to return to our center. An invisible spirit hand leads us to look into the source of our everyday and also Imaginative thinking. We see and dance in the radiant light and pools of ethereal beings of thought. We know that we are now living in the prenatal life of our thought. We find ourselves surrounded by thought-like babies (some loving, some treacherous) who ask us to conceive them in thought. A mocking and warning thought element can arise here, which shocks us back toward our earthly consciousness, and we now follow it back recognizing on the way how thinking sacrifices itself in dying down into the senses. As we approach the solid elements of etheric-physical remembrance that we have consciously built, our soul is completely broken apart. But the conscious anchor we have built between normal consciousness and spiritual Imagination helps to keep our wholeness from disappearing altogether. In this breaking apart of the soul, our thinking and our willing fly away into different dimensions. Our center is lost. I become the human-world abyss. I cannot find my I, until a third being arises in between thinking and willing. Thinking and willing must learn to create a new astral feeling nature out of the abyss. “It is this recognition of the mysterious nature of ‘feeling’ that now becomes the most unstable and vulnerable, but the only uniting sense of coherent identity… I only exist as an I when my two divided poles recognize in the third my surfacing abyss. I am only when I consciously feel the division in my broken soul centre; when I am not, I am. In constant decay, I am whole...Man hears the inner soul aspect of his participation in the etheric Mystery of Golgotha.” (p 82) The Christ articulates it as “Out of the opening abyss of your thinking’s grave I arise. I was crucified in your thoughts; now I am resurrected in your self-consciously incurred soul death and dissolution. You are dismembered out of Me; it is your future task to re-member yourself – by means of your own forces – into Me again. Otherwise you would lose your human form entirely, and slide increasingly into the world-abyss of your soul.” (p 82).
5.B – Opening the Gate of Sense-Perception
The elements of this section of the chapter are expanded upon in the whole of Ben-Aharon’s book, Cognitive Yoga, which concentrates most of its work on demonstrating how to spiritualize, virtualize, or etherize the elements of sense-perception. Nevertheless, every sentence in The New Experience of the Supersensible, including this section, is absolutely precise, alive, and derived from experience rather than hypothesis. Therefore, our senses of seeing color, smelling flowers, touching the grass, feeling the warmth of the Sun, and so on can become wakeful spiritual perceptions. Etherized sense-perception can become ‘formative world-thinking’. “Man as a cognitive being of thinking and sense-perception, taken as a whole and consciously transformed, is the twofold bridge...having individualized the abyss...and made it into his own inner world, [the human being] can carry the fruits of Earth to the heavens.” (p. 83) The sense objects we perceive are not really out there in space. We freeze them and squeeze out their living streams in every perception. We kill the living light, and the living soul and spiritual world in every sensation, just like we do in forming every mental image. The mental image blocks us from living thinking, just as the object blocks us from spiritualized perception – so we must learn how to dissolve and redeem the living streams in the ‘object.’ We unconsciously glue together the frozen light and sensation-crystals with the dead mental image, and this produces everyday consciousness, knowledge, objects, and subjective self-security. So we must learn how to separate these elements. “An ‘object’ is, in the purely sense-world, an etheric-elemental flowing reality, fixated, cemented and sedimented, made dense and heavy through...our bodily, willed touch.” (p 85)
“In the moment we cease [the object’s] unconscious consolidation, it etherizes, becomes transparent and rent in twain, revealing the real living and ensouled world-man behind it.” (p 84) How do we do this? We must come to experience how the spiritual senses of life, movement, and balance penetrate into our senses of sight, touch, smell, and taste, and produce the mental conviction that I am a material body living among other material bodies that really exist. A weakly perceived sense of spiritual equilibrium joined with a strongly perceived color produces the idea of material existence. We need to dive into the region of opaqueness between our inner senses and our outer senses and become conscious of how the sense of sight and hearing are sucked too deeply into the body, while the sense of balance and movement are projected too far outside. These over-extensions block the spiritual perception, so we have to re-balance them. When we gently become aware of the sense of the inner movement of the body and the sense of the outer sounds, and then separate their streams, we can become aware of the whole web of WILL that flows inside and outside through the whole world. We see the outer etheric world and the inner spiritual nature of the body by doing this. (For more on this technique, see Cognitive Yoga). The complete nature of the process of strengthening our lives, souls, and spirits in order to completely open the gates of spiritualized sense-perception is then elaborated. The guiding thread is that we can learn how to consciously bring the autumn processes into the spring processes. [1] By practicing the plant exercises in Rudolf Steiner’s Knowledge of Higher Worlds (especially the seed and the mature plant elements), we awaken to the pulsing rivers and cliffs of time flowing through the etheric body. We find the “eternal fountains of life within the Christ-permeated part of man’s etheric body.” (p 87) [2] The dying and blossoming elements of life and time are then moved in and out of each other; the future and past cliffs of time move in and out of each other. “This process is intensified until the two streams not only reach and touch in each other’s infinite end point but, pouring themselves through the other’s infinity, merge into one stream that circles and reverses itself through a central point for both time formations at once.” (p 87) The life of the fully grown plant and the seed pass into one another in a pulse; the seasons pass into each other in a crossing point of rhythmic expansion and contraction. [3] After this life cycle in the etheric body is consciously formed, we begin to focus on the soul or astral drama of the whole cycle of life, death, and rebirth in the subtle changes of feeling throughout the year. This is outlined in Rudolf Steiner’s 'Calendar of the Soul.'
We travel from soul sympathy, and expanding warmth and love, but then begin to dim down again in pain, coldness and antipathy. After much practice, we find that the winter processes begin to take the upper hand. The cold abyss of death and inner powerlessness start to dominate the harmonious and sympathetic development of feelings in our soul-year. We can find no power to break the increasing ascendancy of this dying, painful freezing and so this then brings the soul cycle to a complete stop. [4] However, the pain, contraction, and dying in the life and soul can be then neutralized, and the whole process is lifted to the Ego or level of the I. “There man must struggle to discover the inner point where no vital change and no change of consciousness can overpower him...[One] can freely master the natural streams in his elemental body, and freely direct his soul attention and so cross the time streams at will.” (p 88) We learn how to consciously carry the whole life cycle and soul year, but also experience the complete development of the resurrection of the ego and the whole of nature through Christ. Then Ben-Aharon gives a complete demonstration of how to spiritualize an individual perception. We start with a seed, for example. We note all of its sense perceptual elements, like color and hardness. We then actively think through all of the ideas connected with it. Our goal is to strengthen the elements of normal thinking and perception and then SEPARATE them.
We have to learn to only think when we are intuiting ideas. We must learn only to perceive when we are sensing sounds and textures. Each must be brought into its own dimension. No overlapping. The gap must be then widened between them. Pure time must flow. One now stops the forming of mental images and memory. I merely perceive the pure flow of color. When we cancel reflection, as our eyes and senses swim in the light surrounding every ‘object’, eventually we can flow into the World-Imaginations which always surround us and there perceive the Etheric Christ. In the colored streams of life, we also find that the true Spiritual I is also able to swim there, outside of all concepts and bodies. We can then be taught how to create new life in this living life stream. The world creates a new human as well. When we learn how to consciously control the vitalizaton and devitalization, by repeatedly practicing these transformation of sense-perception and thinking, we can then consciously build the faculty of spiritual remembrance. This means to control the living sources of space and time, and to perceive how we are woven together in the World Imaginations of our Angel and the Christ.
5C – The Construction of the Bridge to Remember what Happens and what always Exists in my Spiritual Being and in the Spiritual World – the Development of Continuity of Consciousness
In this section, Dr. Ben-Aharon demonstrates how tunnels or bridges of consciousness are created between the soul and spiritual Self and the living physical body and ego on the Earth. As in the earlier sections of the book, he divides this into a thinking, willing, and feeling element or an etheric, astral, and spiritual element. The bridge-construction means far more than following color streams inside the head or merely having visions in the mind’s eye. The continuity of consciousness, memory, and communication between heaven and earth is not only filled with world-images and creative soul-speech (very different in nature from visions and hearing voices), but also with moral crises of self knowledge and soul transformation, as well as creative seeds of future spiritual-physical acts. This development of an entirely new life, soul, and spirit breathing of consciousness between the spiritual worlds and our earthly life there has an Imaginative, Inspirational, and Intuitive level in the strict spiritual-scientific senses. We rebuild our whole being. First, Ben-Aharon describes how an echo of the physical sense of a centered ego and the memory of self has to be carried into the supersensible experience. The spiritual researcher must remember who he was on the earth and then also consciously write an extract of the current soul and spiritual experience onto the physical-etheric mirror that exists on the earth, while he or she is still on the other side. I must consciously dim down, devitalize, and condense my etheric, soul, and spiritual experiences and push them back across the gap of forgetfulness.
First, the pure will force of thinking and meaning as well as the cloud formations of cosmic time must be woven into a single rhythmic force. This is at the heart of the ‘new yoga will’ or Michaelic Yoga that Steiner described and which Ben-Aharon developed in Cognitive Yoga. This centralizing pulse or tool is another stone or cross or zone of remaining awake that can contribute the first step of this process of continuity of memory. Spiritualizing thinking, although still very difficult, is the easier pole for modern human beings (it is like redeeming the first thief crucified with Christ). To transform sense perception into etheric perception of the cosmic development of meaningful timestreams lies at a higher degree of difficulty. What are these forces and where is the zone in which we unite them? One must remain awake at the moment where subjective thinking ends and one is turned inside out and the pure will thinks me (but now I AM also at the source of this will). This is the zone of the first Umstülpung or reversal in thinking. The second zone is brought into clear consciousness at the place where our normal perception of the colors, sounds, smells, and sensations of an ‘object’ meet the “world’s living, streaming time-pictures” (p 96) flowing into the etheric eye-stream. Before these two streams completely merge, we hold on to the zone of their difference. Then we begin to pull in the pure etheric streams of sensation rivers and push out the will-thinking activity. Living-dying thinking and dying-living perception are then woven together or crossed into a new zone of consciousness with a self-aware I AM. “It is the eternal...soul breathing and spirit pulsating of the ‘I’ at, over and in the mystery of world-man bridge creation – phoenix-like ever vitalizing, devitalizing and revitalizing itself in order to awaken, create and increase cosmic self-consciousness.” (p 97) This is the cognitive part of the bridge, “standing still at the point of man’s singularity, founding self-consciousness in the zero point of space and the breaking through of living, cyclically self-annihilating and self-resurrecting time.” (p 98)
Technique for Transforming Materialistic Thoughts or Confronting the Dragon with the Sword of Michael
Then Ben-Aharon outlines one cognitive-meditative technique so that the Michaelic force in us can battle the Dragon in order to build the shining crystal bridge. First, you begin by choosing, reading, understanding, and thinking through a specific line of scientific or philosophical thought, which is clearly materialistic (dead, abstract, ahrimanic) in its linkage and development of ideas. “The great classical materialists of the 19th century are the best” (p 99), people such as Ludwig Buechner, Jacob Moleschott, Marx, Freud, Darwin, and Auguste Comte. Kant is also useful and one can use Hegel for practice, but the Hegelian dialectic is already half alive, so each person doing the practice must choose his or her own materialist ‘enemy’ to struggle with and transform. Indeed, after one becomes proficient, any line of thought and concept can be spiritualized, from any era. What do we do? Study it, and think it through very carefully and thoroughly with ordinary and absolutely clear consciousness. (For example, from Darwin - “Even without any change in the proportional numbers of the animals on which our [swiftest and slimmest] wolf preyed, a cub might be born with an innate tendency to pursue certain kinds of prey. Nor can this be thought very improbable; for we often observe great differences
in the natural tendencies of our domestic animals; one cat, for instance, taking to catch rats, another mice; one cat...bringing home winged game, another...rabbits, and another hunting on marshy ground and almost nightly catching woodcocks or snipes. The tendency to catch rats rather than mice is known to be inherited. Now, if any slight innate change of habit or of structure benefited an individual wolf, it would have the best chance of surviving and of leaving offspring.” - The Origin of Species). You must pull it deeply down into the physical brain itself, not remaining floating and confused. You use all the best forces of modern thinking. You feel that you grasp it inwardly and strongly. Only then can the ‘deactualization’ process (as he calls it in The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art) begin.
You now separate the intellectual content (the meaning and mental pictures) from the pure form of the chosen line of thought. Then you concentrate all of your forces only on the pure development of dynamic forces or energy that is left over from this intellectual linkage of concepts in the head. Let us imagine that the line of thought or the content of the materialistic argument from Marx is linked together like movie pictures projected from a boat onto a series of icebergs as ‘screens.’ These different size icebergs and their order on the water are the pure forms. When you stop projecting the movie onto the icebergs, only the crystalline shapes of the iceberg remains, along with their sizes and the particular way that the different icebergs are linked up to one another. Only the inner feeling of having this particular linkage of icebergs in your head remains. The residue from the argument resonates with its own energy, like electrical currents, even though you have forgotten or wiped away the ideas themselves. Focus on just the forces (of course, to be consistent we would have to imagine that in our analogy the icebergs were formed along with the projection of the movie – the meaning of the movie in a sense formed its own screen). The separation between form and content takes place behind the eyes, but the pure forces are poured back into the middle brain and finally down into the spinal column. When the hollow tunnel connecting the forehead with the spinal column is perceived, this signals the release of the etheric brain from the physical brain. Then you carry the pure form and force dynamic residue of the thought sequence repeatedly into the etheric body from head to heart.
Ben-Aharon writes:
“We 1) begin to experience the thought's forms around the larynx region in inner light-shade perception; 2) we begin to feel the thought's warmth and frost formations and emanations as direct inner contact in the heart region; and 3) we can voluntarily enhance this process and condense it to such an extent that, in and through the heart, it radiates its coldness or warmth forces into the whole body, into the hands and then back into the eyes and inner head, until the circle of freed etheric activity, started in the brain, is—through heart and limbs—closed and made thereby etherically, imaginatively visible as a totality. When we are securely grounded in our meditation so far, we can begin the actual 'heart confrontation' with the inner ahrimanic forces dwelling in the force-dynamic of the thought process which we have worked through. This confrontation is brought about through the most intensive condensation of the freezing-cold atmosphere that emanated from the forces released in the meditation described above, extracted from a thoroughly assimilated materialistic thought dynamic. Man gathers and guides all the sub-earthly head forces, which assume in the larynx region a darkening arrow or spear form, and then—being morally and cognitively permeated with the Christ-impulse—condenses its cold spirit like metal further still and thereby also sharpens its cutting astral edge. He thrusts it consciously into his warm, luminous heart centre until it begins to bleed etherically. Imaginatively speaking, the drops of blood freeze in bleeding and are transformed into the shining Quint-Essentia pearls and diamonds on which the bridge is constructed. When this process begins to ray itself in pictures back to the head centre—circulating backwards and upwards in the consciously transformed and thereby closed etheric circuit—it becomes imaginatively visible.
In the backward radiating inner imaginative pictures we perceive now the etheric bridge of remembrance arched majestically over the abyss of time's annihilation stream, shining with pure spirit light in the ahrimanic night of our age. This imaginative faculty is achieved as the result of the transformation process of the world intelligence that fell into the claws of Ahriman, now returned to its source as fully humanized Michaelic intelligence. This faculty is the Michael sword, and the process described above is the inner work of its conscious spiritual- scientific steeling. As we saw above, its metallic substantiality was won for the Michaelic forces in the inner fight with the materialistic and intellectual ahrimanic forces that control the modern human brain. It was then etherically transfigured and steeled in the fire of the human Christ-permeated heart. This sword is the power that serves both to perceive and to overcome Ahriman's presence in the physical-etheric subterranean world, where he unfolds his mightiest power as the guardian and lord of all elemental intellectuality that is immersed and externalized in objectivity, far from its original source in the macro- cosmic heart centre. The process described above is precisely that to which Rudolf Steiner referred in the moment when he fierily exclaimed: ‘We must find the possibility to turn to our supersensible heart!’” (pp 99-100)
Now Ben-Aharon describes the astral or soul side of building the bridge of the continuity of memory, sense of self, and consciousness. You must return to the complete soul shattering and intense moral pain of self-knowledge standing before the burnt down cross, where Christ is continuously crucified in the etheric world today. You have to begin to consciously control your entire moral breakdown in your heart. You carry a tiny element of the dead forces of the head out into broken soul world. You project a willed aspect of myself over the abyss; but this means you become the void and take in the nothingness. You widen the split in the soul and the world time pictures or living Imaginations are woven into the emptiness of your soul void. Then you see the shocking picture of the lower forces of your soul. You have to slowly and gently learn how to morally move with the soul through astral space. To go backwards in the soul space is “to strive towards the moral soul state that can stand upright under the living-dying, burning-freezing etheric cross; one has an upward, morally self-sustaining force in the soul world only then.” (p 103) Remember that everything in the astral is the opposite of earthly orientation, shape, and movement.
You must be able to stand in the face of our moral ugliness without shame, then one can navigate back to the etheric-physical cross to remember what happened in the soul and spirit world. To move forward in soul space, you must admit that you cannot find the being that can overcome your evil in the astral world. Only weakness and helplessness can paradoxically form the solidity necessary at this stage. One becomes the world-man moral riddle in the helpless abyss, and this is woven into the I feeling. One can only offer one’s wound and pure life question up to the Christ at this moment. “Only when we are grounded in this absolute dualism and fragmentation of our moral being may we be granted the Christ experience at this stage...Then there resounds, as a spoken, cosmically articulated answer, a spirit-filled affirmation from the other, higher spirit side of oneself.” (pp 103-104) Like Christ lifting Peter above the waters of the ocean, the Higher Self can now unite with the lower self, the memory, and the soul. It can fill the being of man with its healing creative power. Then the descending and the ascending are woven together. The Christ Spirit gives the power of creation to the earthly human being. A new drama of creativity can begin, filled with new acts, formed out of the first stage of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming.
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